an alternative to recruitment

Are you looking to play a leading role in an exciting start up business opportunity? If you are then we’d love to hear from you!

Mumbu (www.mumbu.com) is a new way for Mums to find work opportunities that fit around family life. At Mumbu we believe in mums that want to work and we believe in local business. Mums need flexibility to fit around family life and local business needs access to talented people.

We are looking for a new management team to launch Mumbu to the world and take us to the next level. Are you our next CEO or the person that can be a key member of our leadership team? This is is more than a just a job, it is an exciting business opportunity. We are looking to put in place a structure (management and financial) that will enable Mumbu to take the next step and help mums across the country find flexible work opportunities that benefit their day to day lives.

If you are passionate about what we are trying to achieve and you think you can help, then please get in touch for a chat or for more information (nick@mumbu.com).

Are you looking to play a leading role in an exciting start up business opportunity? If you are then we’d love to hear from you!

Mumbu (www.mumbu.com) is a new way for Mums to find work opportunities that fit around family life. At Mumbu we believe in mums that want to work and we believe in local business. Mums need flexibility to fit around family life and local business needs access to talented people.

We are looking for a new management team to launch Mumbu to the world and take us to the next level. Are you our next CEO or the person that can be a key member of our leadership team? This is is more than a just a job, it is an exciting business opportunity. We are looking to put in place a structure (management and financial) that will enable Mumbu to take the next step and help mums across the country find flexible work opportunities that benefit their day to day lives.

If you are passionate about what we are trying to achieve and you think you can help, then please get in touch for a chat or for more information (nick@mumbu.com).

follow the Sunflower Trust on Facebook

Motherhood brings with it a whole catalogue of shifts in perspective but, for me, the biggie was the way I viewed (and valued) time. I used to spend time with abandonment – now, I milk it for all its worth! This has impacted the way I approach work too.

A year after the birth of my first daughter, my return-to-work-job-hunting escapades began and ended within a four-month period. I became fed up with having the ‘part-time or full-time’ discussion and watching the financial value of my time diminish the less of it that was available. It felt like all my hard work, experience and productivity meant nothing against the giant that is Time.

Logically, we all know that it’s not how long you sit at a desk for that makes the difference but what you do whilst you are there. In any business, the go-to people in demand – to join the team, lead the campaign or give their opinion – are the people who are the most positive, capable and productive. The assessment we instinctively make about the value of a person’s input rarely considers the actual time slot they are at their desk for – it’s just not (in my humble opinion) the defining factor which takes a business from being good to great. However, it is hard to convince a new employer of this fact when they don’t want the worry of whether the job can be done or not by a ‘part-timer’.

A year after my second daughter was born, my husband asked if I would be a test case for a colleague’s new recruitment website, Mumbu, aimed at Mum’s looking to get back into work. All I had to do was set up a profile and give my feedback. Thankfully, it was quick to do and I could happily report back that it ticked all the right boxes: I didn’t have to provide a personality-less, bone-dry list of positions and instead Mumbu helped me express my skills and talents in a new way. Plus, I was grateful to be in the driving seat of my (theoretical) search by selecting the companies and charities that I felt a natural allegiance with and extending an invite to connect.

Well, the irony is that two weeks later I landed my perfect job at a children’s charity, The Sunflower Trust. The CEO of The Sunflower Trust, Nichola, accepted my invitation to connect and we began chatting about what we were looking for and I started work a few weeks later – part-time. However, the story of my appointment doesn’t end there, I was surprised and heartened to hear that most of the staff at the Sunflower Trust work part-time. Furthermore, they are the most productive team I have ever worked with!

Part-time working eradicates ‘faffing’. At Sunflower, we arrive, we catch up, we get on. If we need to discuss something then our CEO, Nichola, will ask for our attention – we’ll discuss it, we’ll agree our actions and we’ll get on. If I have an issue, I’ll ask for Nichola’s attention, we discuss it, we agree the solution and we get on. It’s a very rewarding and productive environment.

The fact that it is a children’s charity does help focus the mind too. We all believe that the children going through the Sunflower Programme deserve the most we can possibly give – and the fact that it is a health and wellbeing programme for children helps us walk the talk and maintain a positive attitude and a healthy work-life-balance: all of us exercise, get outdoors, eat well and challenge the left-right thinking of our brains just like the children on our programme.

The moral of this story? Approach Mumbu with caution…you may land a job even if you don’t mean to!

Rather than make you read the entire article before getting to the answer (well, my view at least) I’ll say it within the first two lines. The answer is plain and simple: skills and experience.

Prior to becoming mums women build successful careers, hold senior roles and achieve the highest accolades in business. The only difference is that more often than not it’s women who take career breaks to focus on their number one priority – their children. However their skills, knowledge and talent do not disappear.

If you’ve read our other blogs then you’ll be familiar with the concept of MUMBU’s hidden stars – highly skilled and talented people, often on businesses’ doorsteps, who don’t necessarily want to work full time but who still want to apply their skills where they can. Mums fit perfectly into that profile.

In 1996, 67% of married or cohabiting mothers with dependent children were in work. By 2013 this had increased to 72% and forecasts suggest that this is only going to continue to increase.

The problem for businesses however, is that finding mums looking for new work opportunities is practically impossible, yet arguably they have the most to offer in terms of both skills and experience. It’s also a challenge for mums to find work opportunities that fits in with family life. And this is where MUMBU can help.

MUMBU is a new online platform that is exclusively designed for mums and provides a route to quickly tap directly into the UK’s workforce. It’s free and enables mums to match their skills with businesses looking for those particular skillsets. It also places both the individuals and the business in joint control of the recruitment process, negating the need for a recruitment consultant. And, as it’s private, it means that the users’ identities aren’t revealed until both parties accept a connection.

MUMBU is unique and simple and can help you connect with businesses by enabling you to showcase you as a person, and not you as a CV.

Help us change how mums and businesses connect. Sign up at www.mumbu.com and establish a work-life balance that suits you.

Sunflower’s mission to ‘help every child be the best that they can be’ simply cannot be achieved without the right team behind it. In fact, no business can achieve its desired goal by the sheer will of the CEO alone – believe me, I have tried! – it’s people who make the difference.

At Sunflower, we have improved the lives of hundreds of children and I credit that to having high-quality staff. Many of the parents that get in touch with us do so because either their children are experiencing behavioural, learning or health difficulties or sometimes they just need a little extra help to achieve their potential. It’s hard for parents to watch their child struggle – academically, socially or even on the sports field – therefore, I need staff with more than a good skillset under their belt, I need staff that are understand the difficulties they are facing and are driven to help improve the lives of these young people and those of the family.

Through Mumbu, I am lucky to have found, what Nick might refer to as, “hidden gems” and I do my utmost to keep them. I chose Mumbu as my preferred recruitment method because its ethos resonates with my own – It’s effective and flexible. To my mind, it’s smart to offer flexible working – it’s good for business because it attracts high-quality people and it’s good for staff because it allows them to manage their work-life balance in a way that serves them best, which should not be compromised.

As the CEO, I simply don’t have time to wade through a pile of white-washed CVs that tell me nothing about the person behind them. What I liked about Mumbu was that it allowed candidates to pitch to me in their own style. A prospective candidate could quickly and easily learn about what we do and, if our mission resonated with them, extend an invitation to connect, or vice versa. I didn’t need to provide a narrow definition of a job or be the recipient of a narrowed-down list of candidates, I could simply cast my net wide and catch the best local talent. Indeed, on one occasion I didn’t even know I was looking for another member of the team until I couldn’t let the skillset slip through my fingers!

I need staff to very quickly get up to speed, be on the same page as the charity’s mission and to demonstrate understanding and empathy for the desperate families who contact us. Not only that but they need to be creative, think outside the box and deliver so much more than just being a member of staff – the key for me is finding the right person. The Sunflower Programme is an innovative, holistic and complex approach for helping children to be more integrated by balancing the brain with the body – it has far-reaching effects on the way a child moves, feels and behaves.

One of the greatest pleasures of my job is bearing witness to the transformation the programme can make in a child’s life. Seeing the difference good health can make in classroom behaviour underlines my belief that a good work-life balance in adulthood lends to more productive employees. We want children to enjoy as much of their childhood as they possibly can and, to this end, I want staff to be productive for as much of their working time as they possibly can. This includes me!

follow the Sunflower Trust on Facebook

Rather than make you read the entire article before getting to the answer (well, my view at least) I’ll say it within the first two lines. The answer is plain and simple: skills and experience.

Prior to becoming mums women build successful careers, hold senior roles and achieve the highest accolades in business. The only difference is that more often than not it’s women who take career breaks to focus on their number one priority – their children. However their skills, knowledge and talent do not disappear.

If you’ve read our other blogs then you’ll be familiar with the concept of MUMBU’s hidden stars – highly skilled and talented people, often on businesses’ doorsteps, who don’t necessarily want to work full time but who still want to apply their skills where they can. Mums fit perfectly into that profile.

In 1996, 67% of married or cohabiting mothers with dependent children were in work. By 2013 this had increased to 72% and forecasts suggest that this is only going to continue to increase.

The problem for businesses however, is that finding mums looking for new work opportunities is practically impossible, yet arguably they have the most to offer in terms of both skills and experience. It’s also a challenge for mums to find work opportunities that fits in with family life. And this is where MUMBU can help.

MUMBU is a new online platform that is exclusively designed for mums and provides a route to quickly tap directly into the UK’s workforce. It’s free and enables mums to match their skills with businesses looking for those particular skillsets. It also places both the individuals and the business in joint control of the recruitment process, negating the need for a recruitment consultant. And, as it’s private, it means that the users’ identities aren’t revealed until both parties accept a connection.

MUMBU is unique and simple and can help you connect with businesses by enabling you to showcase you as a person, and not you as a CV.

Help us change how mums and businesses connect. Sign up at www.mumbu.com and establish a work-life balance that suits you.

If you’ve read my earlier piece on ‘hidden stars’ then you’ll know by now that I’m well-aware of the challenges faced by small businesses – because I’ve experienced (and continue to experience) them myself.

Owning and running a business is a perpetual balancing act that requires hard work, an ability to deliver and an ability to plan.

All successful businesses work hard – they probably wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t. Likewise, the longevity of a business correlates with its ability to deliver. Planning, however, can often be the chink in a business’s armour, with the biggest chink being recruitment.

How many times have you, as a business owner or manager, suddenly realised that you need additional resource – and fast? It’s probably fair to say that by that point, it’s already too late and you’re already in the eye of the storm. Of course the alternative, whereby you recruit someone before you need them, sounds sensible but it’s unworkable in reality and certainly more expensive.

So how do you achieve the middle ground? What if you could assemble your company’s very own fantasy league of dream team employees long before the storm hit – all for £20 per month? Let’s not forget that traditional recruitment is an expensive business both in terms of the time required to carry out the process and the associated fees. And that’s just to find one person. With MUMBU, the only limit to the number of potential candidates you have access to is the number of candidates signed up.

Fees based on percentage of someone’s salary are high – even on an entry-level salary. And then time spent reading CVs, filtering and interviewing is hugely draining on the precious time you could be using to add value to your customers.

MUMBU facilitates proactive recruitment. It enables businesses to build a team of skilled mums in the background so that when the time comes and workflow increases, recruitment becomes something that a business controls rather than frantically reacts to.

Using MUMBU to make high-value (and low cost) connections in advance of peaks in business activity is a new approach to recruitment. Hey, we’ve even designed it to make recruitment a pleasant experience as opposed to the chore that it’s often perceived to be.

Stripping back the formality and process-driven nature of recruitment, our platform allows businesses to create a relationship with talented, like-minded mums well in advance. Once a connection has been made you can even arrange to meet for a coffee to get a better feel for a person (although as you will see when using MUMBU, the platform allows users to get a feel for someone prior to meeting them).

Essentially, MUMBU enables businesses and charities to hold the cards rather than letting other organisations (maybe even those that put their interests before yours) hold them. We want to show users that with MUMBU, there is another way. And, importantly, one that they control.

Proactive recruitment isn’t just a throwaway term but a concept that has the ability to add real value to businesses and remove the element of unpredictability that can loom over the hiring process. Click here to find out for yourself.